


Room for One More

by frecklesarechocolate



Series: Ella!Verse [7]
Category: Supernatural
Genre: Domestic, Domestic Dean Winchester, Domestic Fluff, Fluff, M/M, Schmoop
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2013-05-25
Updated: 2013-05-25
Packaged: 2017-12-12 23:02:03
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,126
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/817076
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/frecklesarechocolate/pseuds/frecklesarechocolate





	Room for One More

 

Ella loves going to the grocery store with them, so it’s become their Saturday morning routine. Ella is always the first one up, and she makes her own breakfast, because in her own words, “I’m seven years old, Papa, I can do it on my own.” In her case, ‘doing it on her own’ involves pouring herself a bowl of Cheerios and drowning it in milk. She’s a meticulous eater, though, either out of some genetic inheritance, or out of sheer disgust at watching Dean eat.

Dean gets up a little while later and starts up the coffee, and Cas is always the last one up. No matter how early he goes to bed, he’s a bear to get up in the mornings. He has to be dragged kicking and practically screaming into the day. Dean has tried to cajole Cas with kisses, promises of coffee, pancakes, bacon and sausage, he’s tried blow jobs, and just about anything else he can think of (and he’s nothing if not creative sexually). It’s rarely successful. 

Ella has tried too - jumping up and down on the bed, tickling Cas, threatening to dump a bucket of water on him (Dean nipped that one in the bud though, not wanting to ruin the mattress), and Cas will still take upwards of half an hour to fully wake up and another twenty minutes to actually get out of bed, scowling ferociously at his family the entire time.

This means that they don’t usually get to the grocery store until late morning, which on a Saturday means crowds of people. There are families, groups of friends going on picnic outings, people preparing for dinner parties and college students buying up all the beer.

No matter how many times Dean and Cas have told her not to, Ella stands on the end of the shopping cart riding backward through the aisles and pointing out items of interest. She’s learned not to pick things up and throw them in the cart herself, but she has an awful lot of  _ideas_ of the sorts of things that they should bring home. Dean finds it perplexing that most of her ideas run to the healthy, and he’s complained about it at length to Sam, who finds it uproarious. 

“Dude, serves you right. She’s just trying to make sure you're around for a while, I guess,” Sam said to him after the twentieth complaint about peas, lettuce and  _parsnips for crying out loud._

This particular Saturday, Ella’s been a bit subdued, and has been since they came in from the parking lot behind another small family of two, a girl maybe a year or two younger than Ella and a boy a couple of years younger than his sister. She doesn’t pick up anything extra to go in the cart, or try to weasel just one more bag of cherries out of Dean, and Dean and Cas begin to exchange worried glances with each other over her head.

On the ride home, Ella is uncharacteristically quiet, and she helps unload and put away the groceries with no complaints. She’s headed out of the kitchen when Dean stops her with a word.

“Ella.” She turns around, face somber, and Dean realizes this is probably going to take more than a couple of words in the doorway. “Come on,” he says, putting his arm around her shoulders and ushering her into the living room. Cas follows close behind.

They pile onto the couch, Ella squeezed between them. She lays her hands on her thighs and wiggles her fingers.

“Okay punkin, what’s going on?” Dean asks.

“Nothing,” she answers.

“Angel,” Cas says in a warning tone. “It’s clearly _something_.” 

Ella sighs, as if she’s being unfairly put upon, and stares down at her fingers for a long moment. Dean and Cas wait, having long learned that the best way to get her to talk is to be patient. She’ll come through eventually.

She does. “I want a little brother,” she says. She juts her chin up and out defiantly, as if daring them to say no. 

“Oh,” Cas says, and Dean rubs his eyes. “Angel, it’s…” Cas pauses. “It’s not that easy.” Dean leans down and kisses the top of her head.

“I _know_ that,” she says, because  _of course she does_. She’s seven, she’s not stupid, and she knows that getting a little brother or sister is not as easy as expressing the desire to have a little sibling and poof! they appear.

“Sweetheart,” Dean begins, but he doesn’t know how to end the sentence, because how do you explain to your daughter that two daddies can’t just decide to have another child, that it doesn’t work that way, and that it was hard enough getting her in the first place. The uncertainty of waiting to find out if they could adopt her had nearly killed them, had driven a wedge between them for _months_ , and now…

“I know Daddy,” Ella says, and she reaches out for Dean’s and Cas’s hands, clasping them in her own. “But don’t you want a little boy?” 

Cas inhales. “There are lots of things adults want that they can’t necessarily have, Ella. Daddy and I haven’t actually talked about this, though.”

Ella jumps up from the couch. “Okay, so I’ll go play and you two can talk about it.” Before either of them have the chance to respond, she gives them each a hug, squeezing tightly around their necks, her thin bony arms digging into the soft, vulnerable spots just below their adam’s apples. She leaves them gaping in her wake.

“What the —” Dean says.

“Our daughter is not above emotional blackmail, it seems,” Cas says, but there’s a trace of amusement in his voice.

“We can’t… It’s not…” Dean stops for a second, giving his mouth a chance to catch up to his brain. “We’re not considering this are we?”

Cas is silent for a long moment, and now it’s his turn to examine his hands, carefully avoiding looking at Dean. 

“Cas?”

“It’s something I’ve thought about.” He shrugs. “But it was so hard the first time around, I didn’t want to bring it up.”

Dean shakes his head as if trying to clear it. “Cas, I…” He wonders how this day turned around so quickly. 

Cas leans over and kisses Dean. “I know. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. We can just continue on, the three of us. I’m happy. We’re happy. Our family is wonderful.” He kisses Dean again. “But I think there might be room for one more.” He gets up and goes upstairs, leaving Dean alone in the living room.

“Apparently our daughter isn’t the only one capable of emotional blackmail,” Dean mutters.

 


End file.
